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Robyn and Royksopp accidentally became a band

When Robyn and Royksopp decided to collaborate on a recording project, they did it by stealth and they did it without a plan.

As the three members of this de facto Scandinavian “supergroup” tell it, in fact, this past spring’s terrific Do It Again EP snuck up on them as much as they snuck it up on the public.

Robyn and Royksopp had worked together before, of course, so Do It Again wasn’t entirely without precedent. The Swedish dance-pop queen and the eccentric Norwegian electronic duo of Svein Berge and Torbjorn Brundtland teamed up in 2009 for “The Girl and the Robot,” a winning single from Royksopp’s Junior album, and enjoyed the experience and — as Brundtland puts it — “just each other’s company” enough that they soon worked together again on “None of Dem” for Robyn’s 2010 Body Talk album.

It wasn’t until last year, though, that the three realized their on/off attempts to keep the creative back-and-forth alive with occasional onstage cameos during each other’s shows and occasional writing trips to Bergen, Norway, by Robyn had bred something suspiciously like a band.

“We kept saying to each other that we should make some more music,” recalls Robyn, sharing a tour manager’s phone with the Royksopp-ers backstage at a gig near Washington, D.C.

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“We found ourselves in a period where we really didn’t have anything scheduled,” continues Brundtland. “We didn’t tell anyone we were going to make a collaboration. We just did it without really notifying anybody. And that felt pretty nice.

Swedish pop princess Robyn joined forces with Norwegian electronic duo Royksopp (Svein Berge, left, and Torbjorn Brundtland) for this year's Do It Again EP and a transatlantic tour. (Kacper Kasprzyk)

“We didn’t have anything predefined for us. Which sounds ideal, but it actually can make it more challenging than if, let’s say, we’d had a particular house-music sound that we’d strived for . . . We had to define our sound as we went along.”

In the end, Royksopp and Robyn didn’t so much define a collaborative sound for themselves on Do It Again as offer a tantalizing first taste of the myriad musical possibilities open to the pairing.

The EP manages to traverse melancholy ambient electronica, shimmering synth-pop balladry, tough-assed acid-techno and, of course, the riotous clubland hooks of the devastatingly catchy title track — easily one of the singles of the summer — in just five songs and 35 minutes, hinting that there could be a whole lot more uncharted territory to explore for both parties.

Robyn herself concedes that the process of making Do It Again was a fairly “magical” one.

“There’s this thing that happens when you are around people that you have a good connection with,” she says. “You influence each other’s positions on a very kind of subtle level. Sometimes we don’t even talk about it. It’s just the fact that we’re in the same room, reading each other’s body language or realizing that someone in the room has an idea that they’re trying out. We’re all willing to listen to those kinds of signals.”

Royksopp has a new album due in the fall cheerily titled The Inevitable End, while Robyn and her touring bandmate Markus Jagerstedt are finishing up a record of her own she began with recently deceased producer Christian Falk earlier this year. Yet while everyone has other irons heating in the fire, no one is ruling out more Robyn vs. Royksopp action in the near future.

“We get that question quite a lot and we just say: ‘Hey, why not?’” laughs Brundtland. “I mean, we don’t feel in any way that one thing needs to exclude the other.”

“We just feel like we’re lucky to be able to do the things we want to and we don’t have to choose,” says Robyn. “We can go back into a collaboration when we have the time and we feel like it.”

At present, Robyn and Royksopp are presiding over one of the summer’s most hotly anticipated roving dance parties — a co-headlining tour that features individual sets by each act before one big blow-out jam on the Do It Again material and a few other gems at the climax. The show arrives in Toronto at Echo Beach on Monday.

“There was a bit of concern from me that this would be like an overdose, in a bad sense,” says Berge. “But the set, even though it’s clocking in at over two hours, it doesn’t feel like that at all. We’re building it from some of the more solemn and quiet Royksopp numbers via Robyn’s pop techniques and through to this project. It just feels that it has a natural build to it all. It doesn’t feel overwhelming or exhausting.”

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